A Ripping Tale…

I thought I’d go from the sublime to the ridiculous this week on the product review thing. Now I am not a sponsored blog (no-one is, as yet, anxious to take on that liability ;o) ) so all opinions herein are my own, for better, for worse and all that! Today’s subject is this little baby:

Now I may have mentioned to you that most of the quilt shops we visited on our travels tended towards the more traditional both fabric and pattern-wise, but they did, at least, tend to stock nifty tools that would appeal to all types of quilter. We noticed stands of these seam rippers (rather incongruously named ‘Seam Fix’) next to most of the tills, but despite making comments to several shop workers about the rather odd look and name, it wasn’t until we got to Flagstaff and Odegaard’s Sewing Center that someone finally decided to tell us what they did…

Picture this, you’ve just sewn a crazy mad line and lost the seam allowance on one side of your fabric made a bit of a booboo, and need to frog it. Grasping your trusty seam ripper, you rend the offending stitches asunder, leaving you with a trail of destruction in the form of lots of little bits of thread, guaranteed to get everywhere. To combat this, I tended to try and unpick rather than rip, which, while more time consuming, was considerably tidier!

Enter the Seam Fix! Ripping through those stitches, you finally find your two pieces of fabric with stringy wee bits of thread attached. Then, you put its lid on, and proceed to rub its rubbery top along the former stitching line, whereupon it grabs up said stringy wee bits of thread, gathering them about its person until you see fit to clean it off (a 2 second job) Check out this video demo:

I can’t begin to tell you the joy I found in using this little gem last Sunday when working on Susan’s block in the dreaded 1-9-10 section, so my old basic ripper has been relegated firmly to my travelling hand stitching kit, while this wee guy takes pride of place next to my sewing machine. I can see it getting quite a workout in quilting, dress and bag making!

‘Where can I get one?’ I hear you cry… Well if you’re in the US, probably your local quilt shop lol Otherwise there are a range of options online if you google ‘Seam Fix Seam Ripper’.

If you’ll excuse me, I’m off to build a little shrine, ‘All hail the Seam Fix’…

Ok! So that swirled top really does pick up all those little threads? That's awesome! I usually use a lint roller, but sometimes those have the habit of grabbing the exposed edge of the fabric a little too roughly.